Selected Stories of H. G. Wells

by H. G. Wells

  He turned his mind to locomotion in this new body in which he found himself. For a time he was unable to shift himself from his attachment to his earthly carcass. For a time this new strange cloud body of his simply swayed, contracted, expanded, coiled, and writhed with his efforts to free himself, and then quite suddenly the link that bound him snapped. For a moment everything was hidden by what appeared to be whirling spheres of dark vapour, and then through a momentary gap he saw his drooping body collapse limply, saw his lifeless head drop sideways, and found he was driving along like a huge cloud in a strange place of shadowy clouds that had the luminous intricacy of London spread like a model below.

  But now he was aware that the fluctuating vapour about him was something more than vapour, and the temerarious excitement of his first essay was shot with fear. For he perceived, at first indistinctly, and then suddenly very clearly, that he was surrounded by faces! that each roll and coil of the seeming cloud-stuff was a face. And such faces! Faces of thin shadow, faces of gaseous tenuity. Faces like those faces that glare with intolerable strangeness upon the sleeper in the evil hours of his dreams. Evil, greedy eyes that were full of a covetous curiosity, faces with knit brows and snarling, smiling lips; their vague hands clutched at Mr. Bessel as he passed, and the rest of their bodies was but an elusive streak of trailing darkness. Never a word they said, never a sound from the mouths that seemed to gibber. All about him they pressed in that dreamy silence, passing freely through the dim mistiness that was his body, gathering ever more numerously about him. And the shadowy Mr. Bessel, now suddenly fear-stricken, drove through the silent, active multitude of eyes and clutching hands.

  So inhuman were these faces, so malignant their staring eyes, and shadowy, clawing gestures, that it did not occur to Mr. Bessel to attempt intercourse with these drifting creatures. Idiot phantoms, they seemed, children of vain desire, beings unborn and forbidden the boon of being, whose only expressions and gestures told of the envy and craving for life that was their one link with existence.

  It says much for his resolution that, amidst the swarming cloud of these noiseless spirits of evil, he could still think of Mr. Vincey. He made a violent effort of will and found himself, he knew not how, stooping towards Staple Inn, saw Vincey sitting attentive and alert in his armchair by the fire.

  And clustering also about him, as they clustered ever about all that lives and breathes, was another multitude of these vain voiceless shadows, longing, desiring, seeking some loophole into life.

  For a space Mr. Bessel sought ineffectually to attract his friend’s attention. He tried to get in front of his eyes, to move the objects in his room, to touch him. But Mr. Vincey remained unaffected, ignorant of the being that was so close to his own. The strange something that Mr. Bessel has compared to a sheet of glass separated them impermeably.

  And at last Mr. Bessel did a desperate thing. I have told how that in some strange way he could see not only the outside of a man as we see him, but within. He extended his shadowy hand and thrust his vague black fingers, as it seemed, through the heedless brain.

  Then, suddenly, Mr. Vincey started like a man who recalls his attention from wandering thoughts, and it seemed to Mr. Bessel that a little dark-red body situated in the middle of Mr. Vincey’s brain swelled and glowed as he did so. Since that experience he has been shown anatomical figures of the brain, and he knows now that this is that useless structure, as doctors call it, the pineal eye. For, strange as it will seem to many, we have, deep in our brains—where it cannot possibly see any earthly light—an eye! At the time this, with the rest of the internal anatomy of the brain, was quite new to him. At the sight of its changed appearance, however, he thrust forth his finger, and, rather fearful still of the consequences, touched this little spot. And instantly Mr. Vincey started, and Mr. Bessel knew that he was seen.

  And at that instant it came to Mr. Bessel that evil had happened to his body, and behold! a great wind blew through all that world of shadows and tore him away. So strong was this persuasion that he thought no more of Mr. Vincey, but turned about forthwith, and all the countless faces drove back with him like leaves before a gale. But he returned too late. In an instant he saw the body that he had left inert and collapsed— lying, indeed, like the body of a man just dead—had arisen, had arisen by virtue of some strength and will beyond his own. It stood with staring eyes, stretching its limbs in dubious fashion.

  For a moment he watched it in wild dismay, and then he stooped towards it. But the pane of glass had closed against him again, and he was foiled. He beat himself passionately against this, and all about him the spirits of evil grinned and pointed and mocked. He gave way to furious anger. He compares himself to a bird that has fluttered heedlessly into a room and is beating at the window-pane that holds it back from freedom.

  And behold! the little body that had once been his was now dancing with delight. He saw it shouting, though he could not hear its shouts; he saw the violence of its movements grow. He watched it fling his cherished furniture about in the mad delight of existence, rend his books apart, smash bottles, drink heedlessly from the jagged fragments, leap and smite in a passionate acceptance of living. He watched these actions in paralysed astonishment. Then once more he hurled himself against the impassable barrier, and then, with all that crew of mocking ghosts about him, hurried back in dire confusion to Vincey to tell him of the outrage that had come upon him.

  But the brain of Vincey was now closed against apparitions, and the disembodied Mr. Bessel pursued him in vain as he hurried into Holborn to call a cab. Foiled and terror-stricken, Mr. Bessel swept back again, to find his desecrated body whooping in a glorious frenzy down the Burlington Arcade…

  And now the attentive reader begins to understand Mr. Bessel’s interpretation of the first part of this strange story. The being whose frantic rush through London had inflicted so much injury and disaster had indeed Mr. Bessel’s body, but it was not Mr. Bessel. It was an evil spirit out of that strange world beyond existence, into which Mr. Bessel had so rashly ventured. For twenty hours it held possession of him, and for all those twenty hours the dispossessed spirit-body of Mr. Bessel was going to and fro in that unheard-of middle world of shadows seeking help in vain.

  He spent many hours beating at the minds of Mr. Vincey and of his friend Mr. Hart. Each, as we know, he roused by his efforts. But the language that might convey his situation to these helpers across the gulf he did not know; his feeble fingers groped vainly and powerlessly in their brains. Once, indeed, as we have already told, he was able to turn Mr. Vincey aside from his path so that he encountered the stolen body in its career, but he could not make him understand the thing that had happened: he was unable to draw any help from that encounter…

  All through those hours the persuasion was overwhelming in Mr. Bessel’s mind that presently his body would be killed by its furious tenant, and he would have to remain in this shadow-land for evermore. So that those long hours were a growing agony of fear. And ever as he hurried to and fro in his ineffectual excitement innumerable spirits of that world about him mobbed him and confused his mind. And ever an envious applauding multitude poured after their successful fellow as he went upon his glorious career.

  For that, it would seem, must be the life of these bodiless things of this world that is the shadow of our world. Ever they watch, coveting a way into a mortal body, in order that they may descend, as furies and frenzies, as violent lusts and mad, strange impulses, rejoicing in the body they have won. For Mr. Bessel was not the only human soul in that place. Witness the fact that he met first one, and afterwards several shadows of men, men like himself, it seemed, who had lost their bodies even it may be as he had lost his, and wandered, despairingly, in that lost world that is neither life nor death. They could not speak because that world is silent, yet he knew them for men because of their dim human bodies, and because of the sadness of their faces.

  But how they had come into that world he could not tell, nor where the bodies
they had lost might be, whether they still raved about the earth, or whether they were closed for ever in death against return. That they were the spirits of the dead neither he nor I believe. But Doctor Wilson Paget thinks they are the rational souls of men who are lost in madness on the earth.

  At last Mr. Bessel chanced upon a place where a little crowd of such disembodied silent creatures had gathered, and thrusting through them he saw below a brightly lit room, and four or five quiet gentlemen and a woman, a stoutish woman dressed in black bombazine and sitting awkwardly in a chair with her head thrown back. He knew her from her portraits to be Mrs. Bullock, the medium. And he perceived that tracts and structures in her brain glowed and stirred as he had seen the pineal eye in the brain of Mr. Vincey glow. The light was very fitful; sometimes it was a broad illumination, and sometimes merely a faint twilight spot, and it shifted slowly about her brain. She kept on talking and writing with one hand. And Mr. Bessel saw that the crowding shadows of men about him, and a great multitude of the shadow spirits of that shadow-land, were all striving and thrusting to touch the lighted regions of her brain. As one gained her brain or another was thrust away, her voice and the writing of her hand changed. So that what she said was disorderly and confused for the most part; now a fragment of one soul’s message, and now a fragment of another’s, and now she babbled the insane fancies of the spirit of vain desire. Then Mr. Bessel understood that she spoke for the spirit that had touched her, and he began to struggle very furiously towards her. But he was on the outside of the crowd and at that time he could not reach her, and at last, growing anxious, he went away to find what had happened meanwhile to his body.

  For a long time he went to and fro seeking it in vain and fearing that it must have been killed, and then he found it at the bottom of the shaft in Baker Street, writhing furiously and cursing with pain. Its leg and an arm and two ribs had been broken by its fall. Moreover, the evil spirit was angry because his time had been so short and because of the pain—making violent movements and casting his body about.

  And at that Mr. Bessel returned with redoubled earnestness to the room where the séance was going on, and so soon as he had thrust himself within sight of the place he saw one of the men who stood about the medium looking at his watch as if he meant that the séance should presently end. At that a great number of the shadows who had been striving turned away with gestures of despair. But the thought that the séance was almost over only made Mr. Bessel the more earnest, and he struggled so stoutly with his will against the others that presently he gained the woman’s brain. It chanced that just at that moment it glowed very brightly, and in that instant she wrote the message that Doctor Wilson Paget preserved. And then the other shadows and the cloud of evil spirits about him had thrust Mr. Bessel away from her, and for all the rest of the séance he could regain her no more.

  So he went back and watched through the long hours at the bottom of the shaft where the evil spirit lay in the stolen body it had maimed, writhing and cursing, and weeping and groaning, and learning the lesson of pain. And towards dawn the thing he had waited for happened, the brain glowed brightly and the evil spirit came out, and Mr. Bessel entered the body he had feared he should never enter again. As he did so, the silence—the brooding silence—ended; he heard the tumult of traffic and the voices of people overhead, and that strange world that is the shadow of our world—the dark and silent shadows of ineffectual desire and the shadows of lost men—vanished clean away.

  He lay there for the space of about three hours before he was found. And in spite of the pain and suffering of his wounds, and of the dim damp place in which he lay; in spite of the tears—wrung from him by his physical distress—his heart was full of gladness to know that he was nevertheless back once more in the kindly world of men.

  PART TWO

  TECHNOLOGICAL AND PREDICTIVE SCIENCE FICTION

  INTRODUCTION

  People who don’t know what science fiction is tend to think science fiction is about the future—technologies that don’t exist (yet) and awful cataclysms that haven’t happened (yet). Some of it is. But I don’t recommend using it as a guide to the future. I’d look hard at the (yet).

  Writers of science fiction predicted robots that would do house-work, but didn’t foresee the computer till they were writing their stories on it. They predicted that we’d be colonizing alien planets by now, but not that we’d have so much trouble just getting to Mars.

  The rate of technological invention long ago outstripped the ability of the artist to keep up. Engineers are supposed to be restricted by hard realities, but actually they’re free to invent anything the laws of math, physics, and biology allow, which is, after all, a lot. Their minds can fly. They can defy gravity. Storytellers are supposed to be irresponsible, fancy-free; and indeed they may flout the laws of physics, but not the laws of art. They can’t defy gravitas. Their inventions are bound to and bounded by the limitations of common experience, ordinary understanding, and human emotion. The kind of thing the real cyberheads disparagingly call wetware. Wetware is clumsy stuff, muddy and intractable, but it’s the only stuff you can make stories out of.

  Wells was writing his “futuristic” tales before the twentieth century got going, when technology hadn’t run so far ahead of the writer— when, indeed, the writer could run ahead of the technology. Three of the five stories in this section are exactly that, the writer telling the engineers where they’re going to go. These stories, like many of Jules Verne’s, are genuinely predictive.

  Since about the time it got called science fiction—the late 1920s—science fiction has not, in fact, been able to predict anything much at all. What science fiction can do and does do is offer not predictions but warnings, speculations, and alternatives.

  Much of the strength of Wells’s predictive visions lies there: as warnings, as visions of power out of control, as dreams of Armageddon. “The Argonauts of the Air” was published in 1895, eight years before the Wright brothers took off at Kitty Hawk. It tells of the first trial of a flying machine—the word aeroplane or airplane wasn’t current then.

  The preparations, the machinery, the flight are splendidly, starkly imagined. Although the author speaks of the conquest of the air as being perhaps “costlier than the greatest war,” his mood is adventurous, hopeful. Man will fly: it is only a matter of time. Less time, possibly, than he expected.

  “In the Abyss” was written decades before William Beebe went that first half-mile down in his bathysphere. The details of the imagined technology are explicit and convincing, as is the descent into the depths of the sea. What the explorer of the abyss discovers there is a little less plausible. Though explained in the finest deadpan fakescientific lingo (“descendants like ourselves of the great Theriomorpha of the New Red Sandstone age”), the creatures of the deep belong to Wells’s cheerfully spooky mode. I doubt he really thought we’d meet them.

  “The Star” is the purest example of a kind of story that has been written on its model ever since. Nothing fantastic or implausible: a perfectly possible event. No protagonists, no individual experience. A little necessary scientific jargon, then simple description, immense in scope, rapid in pace, of catastrophe approaching the whole earth. And a few final paragraphs of wry and unexpected summing-up. Wells wrote it in 1897. I doubt its brevity and intensity have been equaled.

  He included “The Star” in his 1913 selection of his own short stories, but omitted the “Argonauts of the Air,” “In the Abyss,” and the next story here, “The Land Ironclads.” He could not have imagined how poignant his predictions, both on the nail and amiss, might seem to people a hundred years later.

  “The Land Ironclads,” published in 1903, demands some imaginative repositioning on the part of the reader. It’s not easy to pretend the First World War won’t happen for ten years yet, and that the word tank means nothing but a container for liquids. It may take a little mental stretch to see what the argument about “Manhood Versus Machinery” meant—and means
.

  The last story in this section, “A Dream of Armageddon”— technological, predictive, terrible—a story about air war—was written in 1901. Still two years to go before Kitty Hawk. And the whole twentieth century and all its wars to come. Here the engineering and the visionary imaginations merge into something approaching prophecy.

  Wells now has the words aeroplane and propellor, though the things did not exist (yet).

  But war existed.

  He tells his tale as a dream recounted by a chance acquaintance to the narrator, thus doubly distancing the emotional, almost hysterical story, which is weirdly complicated by the narrator’s trivial questions, by interruptions from the dreamer’s memories of the waking world, and by the narrator’s awareness of all that is going on around the conversation. “A Dream of Armageddon” is a troubled, troubling story, half out of control, not easy to get out of your head.

  THE ARGONAUTS OF THE AIR

  One saw Monson’s Flying-Machine from the windows of the trains passing either along the South-Western main line or along the line between Wimbledon and Worcester Park,—to be more exact, one saw the huge scaffoldings which limited the flight of the apparatus. They rose over the tree-tops, a massive alley of interlacing iron and timber, and an enormous web of ropes and tackle, extending the best part of two miles. From the Leatherhead branch this alley was foreshortened and in part hidden by a hill with villas; but from the main line one had it in profile, a complex tangle of girders and curving bars, very impressive to the excursionists from Portsmouth and Southampton and the West. Monson had taken up the work where Maxim had left it, had gone on at first with an utter contempt for the journalistic wit and ignorance that had irritated and hampered his predecessor, and had spent (it was said) rather more than half his immense fortune upon his experiments. The results, to an impatient generation, seemed inconsiderable. When some five years had passed after the growth of the colossal iron groves at Worcester Park, and Monson still failed to put in a fluttering appearance over Trafalgar Square, even the Isle of Wight trippers felt their liberty to smile. And such intelligent people as did not consider Monson a fool stricken with the mania for invention, denounced him as being (for no particular reason) a self-advertising quack.